Joanne Stanbridge

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Joanne Stanbridge
Author and Illustrator

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Joanne was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan and lived in several U.S. cities before moving to Canada with her family when she was in the fourth grade.

She says: "Three generations of my mother's family grew up in Haliburton, Ontario, so my Canadian roots run deep, even though my sister and brother and I were born in the States and our dad is from England. He's an aerospace engineer, and when I was growing up his job took us to different U.S. cities, including Kalamazoo (twice), Atlanta, and Seattle. I was nine years old when we moved to Toronto."

In 1979, Joanne earned an honours B.A. in English and Fine Art from the University of Guelph. Later, she graduated with an M.A. in Creative Writing from Concordia University, and an M.L.I.S. degree (Master of Library and Information Studies) from McGill University.

After graduation, she became a librarian and was in charge of the children's department at Westmount Public Library in Montreal for ten years. During that time, her first two books were published.


At the Library	Painting	Writing

These days, she works as a reference librarian in Kingston, Ontario, hangs out on-line and in-person with some amazing children's writers, sings in an energetic community choir called "Shout, Sister!" and spends every free minute writing or painting.


Meesha and Charlie	Shout, Sister!

She says: "A few years ago, driving down a road in Maine in a car full of children's authors, I noticed a mailbox with the name "Plumley Norris" printed on it. What a great name! I imagined a character with that name and put him in my book Famous Dead Canadians.

Later, we discovered that there was a tiny "and" between the two names on the mailbox. So there had never been a real Plumley Norris in the first place.
But by that time, 'my' Plumley had taken on a life of his own!"